Charles Lever, His Life in His Letters, Vol. I

by Charles James Lever

* Richard Lalor Shiel had enjoyed a checkered career. He had
studied for the Catholic priesthood. Then, with a view to
the Bar, he entered Trinity College. When he was only about
twenty years of age he wrote a tragedy. He followed this up
with other plays, the most popular being “Evadne, or the
Statue.” In 1822 he was called to the Bar. In the same year
he allied himself with Daniel O’Connell. He entered
Parliament in 1831. Later he was Vice-President of the Board
of Trade, and subsequently Master of the Mint Gladstone, in
1877, described Shiel as “a great orator with a very fervid
imagination and an enormous power of language and strong
feeling.”—E. D.

Another of Lever’s Irish friends of this period was Catharine Hayes: a biographical sketch of the famous soprano appeared in ‘The Dublin University’ for November 1850.

‘Maurice Tiernay’ commenced its magazine career in May 1850. The story bore no author’s name, but the authorship must have been more than suspected by the readers of ‘The Dublin University.’ Lever was very diligent during this year. In addition to ‘Tiernay’ he had ‘The Daltons’ in hand. M’Glashan was anxious to procure short contributions from the busy man’s pen. He applied to him for a memoir of Samuel Lover,* but Lever declined to undertake anything so onerous as biography. Failing to obtain this memoir, M’Glashan inquired if Lever would furnish materials for a sketch of the author of ‘Harry Lorrequer.’ But Lorrequer was not to be drawn. He explained that though his taste was sufficiently gross to crave laudation, he would be expected to enter into a defence of his Irish character-sketching, and this he would not do. “I will not be a sign-post to myself,” he wrote. “Like old Woodcock in the play, my cry is—‘No money till I die.’”

* The memoir of the author of ‘Handy Andy’—a brief one—
was written by another hand: it appeared in the D. U. M. for
February 1861.—E. D.

Writing to Miss Mitford, in November 1850, Mrs Browning makes a sad complaint of the Irish novelist. “We never see him,” she says; “it is curious. He made his way to us with the sunniest of faces and the cordialest of manners at Lucca; and I, who am much taken by manner, was quite pleased with him, and wondered why it was that I didn’t like his books. Well, he only wanted to see that we had the right number of eyes and no odd fingers. Robert, in return for his visit, called on him three times, I think, and I left my card on Mrs Lever; but he never came again. He had seen enough of us, he could put down in his private diary that we had neither claw nor tail,—and there an end, properly enough. In fact, he lives a différent life from ours; he is in the ball-room and we in the cave,—nothing could be more different; and perhaps there are not many subjects of common interest between us.”

Mrs Browning was unquestionably and not unreasonably offended. In a later letter to Miss Mitford, railing against English society, she says: “People in Florence come together to gamble or dance, and if there’s an end, why, so much the better; but there’s not an end in most cases, by any manner of means, and against every sort of innocence. Mind, I imply nothing about Mr Lever, who lives irreproachably with his wife and family, rides out with his children in a troop of horses to the Cascine, and yet is as social a person as his joyous temperament leads him to be. But we live in a cave, and peradventure he is afraid of the damp of us.” *

* Dr Fitzpatrick asserts in his ‘Life of Lever’ that Lever
was intimately associated with the Brownings in Florence,
and “found a real charm in the companionship.” And pity
‘tis tis untrue!—E. D.

The only plausible explanation of Lever’s neglect of the Brownings is that he did not feel quite at ease in the presence of the author of ‘Aurora Leigh.’ When he sought mental relaxation, after a hard day’s work, he sought it in the society of those who were content to listen to his agreeable rattle rather than in the society of those to whom he should lend his ears. He was by no means insensible to feminine charms, mental or physical. He gloried in praise coming from the mouths of intellectual women. But the woman of genius was not the comrade he coveted in his hours of ease: the companionship of men—of good talkers or good listeners—was what he craved. He had a peculiar reverence for women. He idealised the gentler sex: his heroines are refined, beautiful, pure. He abhorred the intricacies of sexuality in fiction as strongly as he abhorred modern “sensationalism.” Feminine intellectuality of the most exalted type did not attract him—possibly because it was likely to freeze the genial current of his conversation.

The opening of the New Year—1851—did not bring monetary relief. He invited M’Glashan to make him an offer for the copyright of ‘Maurice Tiernay,’ and he told him that he was willing to contribute a new serial to the Magazine when ‘Tiernay’ had run its course. ‘The Daltons’ was still moving slowly along. Mortimer O’Sullivan wrote encouragingly about this novel. Adverting to O’Sullivan’s favourable criticism, the author said that his own feeling was, he had spent too much time dallying among the worthless characters. For this he had an apology to offer—namely, that the good people in the book were fictitious, while the unworthy ones were drawn from life.

M’Glashan was slow to reply, and Lever bombarded him for remittances, vowing that he was so crippled for want of cash that he could not put any heart into his work. It was almost impossible, he declared, to retrench in Florence, “where” (he somewhat naively observes) “we have lived in the best, and consequently in the most expensive, set. To leave it would incur great expense.... I am alternately fretting, hoping, riding, dining, and talking away,—to all seeming the most easy-minded of mortals; but, as Hood said, sipping champagne on a tight-rope.”